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Knopf
January 2012
On Sale: January 17, 2012
304 pages
ISBN: 030737937X
EAN: 9780307379375
Kindle: B004YWKKFU
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction
In The Flame Alphabet, the most maniacally gifted writer of
our generation delivers a work of heartbreak and horror, a
novel about how far we will go, and the sorrows we will
endure, in order to protect our families.
A terrible epidemic has struck the country and the sound of
children’s speech has become lethal. Radio transmissions
from strange sources indicate that people are going into
hiding. All Sam and Claire need to do is look around the
neighborhood: In the park, parents wither beneath the
powerful screams of their children. At night, suburban side
streets become routes of shameful escape for fathers trying
to get outside the radius of affliction.
With Claire nearing collapse, it seems their only means of
survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther, who laughs
at her parents’ sickness, unaware that in just a few years
she, too, will be susceptible to the language toxicity. But
Sam and Claire find it isn’t so easy to leave the daughter
they still love, even as they waste away from her malevolent
speech. On the eve of their departure, Claire mysteriously
disappears, and Sam, determined to find a cure for this new
toxic language, presses on alone into a world beyond
recognition.
The Flame Alphabet invites the question: What is left of
civilization when we lose the ability to communicate with
those we love? Both morally engaged and wickedly
entertaining, a gripping page-turner as strange as it is
moving, this intellectual horror story ensures Ben Marcus’s
position in the first rank of American novelists.
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